Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Good evening. I'm gonna call this January 15 Sammamish Planning Commission meeting to order. Start out with roll call. John Bachman. Here. And we have two commissioners who are joining us online. I'm gonna call on them and have them try to say something so we can also test out the mic. So Souda Sankara.

Good evening and happy New Year everyone. Thank you, chair. I'm here.

Thanks, Souda. We can hear you. How about Dushyam Elquad?

Good evening to you and happy New Year to you. I'm here.

Great. We can hear you too, Dushyam. Mike Bresco. I'm here. Ajay Chakrapani.

I'm here.

Syed Svabian.

I'm here.

And I am Mark Baughman and I am here. Next is approval of the agenda and this evening we're gonna be talking about impact fees and the code that goes with them. Any comments on the agenda? Okay. We'll call the agenda approved. Next is approval of the meeting minutes from our December 4 meeting. Anybody have any comments or corrections to the meeting minutes from the December 4 meeting? Okay. So we'll call the meeting minutes approved. Next is a little bit of recognition. Who's doing that?

I'll start. David. This evening, we wanted to recognize Mark Boffman, our outgoing planning commissioner. And you've been the chair of the commission for, what, going on six years now? Mark has maybe seven years?

Mark has seen a wide range of issues come before the Planning Commission and has presided over those meetings. And we really are appreciative of the even approach Mark has taken to try to make sure that all the planning commissioners have equal opportunity to provide comments. The approach that he takes in receiving public comment from the community and making community members feel welcome at planning commission meetings, his approach in working with staff in trying to help us prepare for meetings and do better in presenting to the planning commission and understand the topics before the meeting so that we're able to do a better job hopefully supporting the commission and the work that it does. So overall, just really thankful for the time we've had with Mark, appreciative of his time. And I know he's looking forward to do something else likely, but we'll miss him.

So we do have a gift for Mark,

and

we wanted to take a minute and to provide this gift to you and then maybe recess for ten minutes and have a treat and then go back to business if that's okay with the commission.

Any objections? Nope. Okay.

You had us a treat. I

object. How am I gonna get the treat virtually? Me and Visham, we object.

We're dropping it in the mail right now.

Thank you.

We'll send a piece via FedEx. Okay.

Let's do how long do you wanna do? Five minutes? Ten minutes?

Ten minutes. Ten So minutes. Take a picture of the group and

it is 06:35 now. We'll come back at 06:45. Okay. Let's get started again here. Thanks for the kind words and the cupcake.

I appreciate it. Let's move on to our public comment period. Would anyone in the room like to make public comment for this evening?

Okay. That's better. But my wife said I've been droning on way too much about that. So I thought I'd give everyone a break and talk a little bit about the future growth in Sammamish. In October and September, it was really easy to think that it was all about choosing the city council.

And I wrote something up, which I sent in, basically pointing out that regional factors are very important in what's going to happen with the growth in Sammamish, although the city council may still have a little bit to do with it. So for example, in 2024, which is the last year that we have good numbers, Redmond grew by 2,340 people. Sammamish grew by 70. This is not a total accident given what's going on in the region. Ten years ago, I know it's hard to believe, Samamish and Redmond were the same size in population.

That will never happen again. Over the last five years, Redmond has added housing and people at a rate 10 times faster than Sammamish. So given a discrepancy like that, what does the future look like? Well, today, Redmond is already 20% bigger than Sammamish. Sammamish, looking forward, has a twenty year growth target, which some people have said is way too high of 2,100 people.

Redmond, 20 sorry. 2,100 units of housing. Redmond, 20,000. And at current growth rates, they'll achieve that. They'll have 20,000 more houses than they do now by 2044. Sammamish also, at its current rate, depending a little bit on how you extrapolate, may be able to hit its growth target at a mere 2,000 units. So during the last four years, we've actually had a pro growth city council in Sammamish. How did this happen? Well, we live in a region. It's not just the decisions that we make in Sammamish.

Redmond's a great place for growth. Many of the advantages you know, it's got easily developable land. It's flat. It's not so impeded by geography. It's got direct freeway access. It now has a light rail train service. It had high paying jobs inside the city already. And we can't forget, it did have support for development that we didn't see in Sammamish. So last November's, Sammamish voters looked at the benefits and costs of rapid urbanization like Redmond has experienced. We chose to go slow, and that is likely to happen.

Thanks, Richard. Who else in the room?

Oh, you got the Kleenex up here so that we can cry at your last meeting. Anyway, good evening, planning commissioners. Paul Stickney. Just a couple snippets on some of the stuff I turned in today and what I'm gonna be sending you of copies of what I gave city council last two meetings. So the first couple pages is just a written copy of my notes on impact fees.

And I followed impact fees back in 2014, so I know a thing or three. Some of the comments that I'm made here, and I'm not gonna say I know everything because there's a lot of new approaches that are happening, but what caught my eye were issues between single family and multifamily population per unit. Trips generated, trips generated if they're in centers or not in centers should be changed. I didn't see much in there on how much the impact fees are for thirty, fifty or 80% AMI units and maybe I missed that. I didn't understand why the town center road projects were all at a 100% impact eligible, and if that means that the only people that will use them are town center residents, that's false.

If that's not what it means, then it's okay. But if it is what it means, that needs to change. On the parks side of things, we have added tremendous amount of parks since we incorporated it. I'm in favor of that. There's a lot of open space, but I don't agree with the per person increase of a linear nature from what we've done in the past for new people coming in. I don't believe the community needs of a lot of new parks. We have a lot of parks. We're well planned on that. So I'm not saying no to parks in any way shape or form. I just think that the amount of incremental increase won't be the same pace as we've increased since incorporation.

The other pages here are two comments I gave to the city council. One on January 6, and I am going to email you what I sent them, and it was a lot of stuff. I did not send that in in advance. You have a lot to do tonight. All I want to do is let you know that I'm going to be sending it.

And what I gave the city council on the on on January 6 was a document about action steps that can add holistic added enrichments across the board and how to make that happen with a compilation of a lot of background material nowhere near everything but but the big stuff. And on the thirteenth, I gave information about false premise or non authentic data that went into comp plan and growth target that needs to be changed to authentic data and then reassessed and consider internal needs besides regional growth combined. So I'll be sending that in. So Mark, sad to see you go. And I was hoping Mary would be on tonight.

Maybe she'll come in and say goodbye to

you. Alright.

Thanks, Paul. Anybody else in the room? Lena, anybody on the team, on the meeting?

I do not see any hands raised in line. Well, Mary watches us later Yeah. Thanks for your comments in the past, Mary.

Mhmm. Okay.

Let's move on to our item of old business, which is discussion of the report and draft code for the revised impact fees. Is this David or you Evan?

It will will be me. Screen is successfully shared and we're ready to get going. Sorry, just orienting my screens here. So tonight we'll be continuing our conversation on impact fees. And the presentation will be broken into two parts.

So the first part, what we want to do is review at a high level what impact fees are and the scaling methodology that our consultant, FCS, helped us come up with to implement the new scaling impact fees. We'll pause after that brief presentation. And the goal is to hear your questions and feedback about the report that was included as exhibit one and also just general questions that you might have still about the methodologies. David and I will do our best to answer kind of high level questions here. If things get more complicated or technical, we'll take those back to folks and, provide written responses in the Q and A matrix in the future.

So we'll go through that. And then the second part of the presentation, we'll go through an overview of the new draft SMC twenty one-six-forty five impact fees code section. And then we'll go through the same feedback and question process. And then lastly, we'll just take a moment to look ahead to the public hearing and what the Planning Commission has coming up next. Just as a reminder, this is now our fourth visit with impact fees.

And over the summer, we did a high level Audrey and David provided a high level presentation of what impact fees are and spent some time talking about the infrastructure and the capital improvements that they support. In September, we came back and we went through our Marksburg example to try to break down at simplish level how you convert impact fees to be scalable in response to changes in state law. In November, FCS, our consultant, provided a presentation detailing their methodologies, and they walked through the different inputs into the formulas and answered some questions about how they got there. And today, we're here to do a review. Coming up, we have a check-in with the council on February 3, we'll get a little feedback and direction from them.

And then once we know kind of what work is going to be coming from the council on this topic, we'll look to schedule either another workshop with the Planning Commission or move to a public hearing just depending on where we are with things. So that's kind of a look ahead. So just to take it back at a high level, what are impact fees? At the simplest form, they're a onetime charge on new development to help pay for additional infrastructure to support that new development. They're used to fund capital infrastructure that's spelled out in our comprehensive plan, and they can be used for things like parks, schools, transportation, and fire.

We do parks, schools, and transportation impact fees. And as we've talked about, we just collect impact fees on behalf of the school districts. They come up with their own formula for calculating the fees based on their own facilities plans. We just are kind of a pass through of collecting that fee and moving it on. So impact fees, the authority to do so comes from RCW 8,202.05 through 01/2010.

And it says that cities under the Growth Management Act may collect impact fees to, as we stated, support the development of new systems related to new development. And the key here is that it must be a proportionate share. Impact fees can't support the full funding of projects on the facilities list. And also, I've underlined and italicized the may collect impact fees. It is a choice.

And part of what we're going to do with the commission and with the city council is what we'll be presenting is what FCS thinks is the maximum impact fee we could assess defensively. Then it's a local policy choice to choose how much of that maximum fee they want we want to assess. We could choose to assess all of it or some percentage in between all to all the way to nothing. So that is part of the conversation that something to think about as a group and make a recommendation to the council who will ultimately decide how to implement impact fees. So currently, impact fees are assessed on a per unit basis.

It's a flat fee whether you're building a 700 square foot cottage or a 5,000 square foot rambler. And as you see, our fees are at the the higher end of of fees compared to peer neighboring cities in in with, you know, single family for streets around 14,000 and parks around near 7,000. So that's kind of what we're working with now. And the reason there are a couple of reasons why we need to update the fees and also why it's just a good time to update the fees. First is the the state senate passed a bill in 2023 requiring the impact fees shift from a per unit basis to some to some scaling methodology.

So the fees would scale with the size of development. Smaller units would pay a smaller fee. Larger units would pay a larger fee. They provided three different methodologies for jurisdictions to choose how to do this either through square footage, bedroom count, or trip generation rates. And the idea behind it was ultimately to encourage smaller, more affordable housing.

And on a different parallel track, the districts are working with the county to create scalable fees for school districts. And they're using the bedroom count method as just a different example of how to assess and estimate occupancy. It also just makes sense to update the fees. They haven't been updated since 2015. So the methodology is stale and the inputs are a little stale.

And with the adoption of the 2024 comprehensive plan and all the other planning work that went into it, so the climate action plan, the housing diversification toolkit, the TM Transit plan. Transit plan, PROs plan. We have plans up the wazoo. So it makes sense now that we have all this great policy in place to reset the fees and move forward on a new track. And I think a key thing here in how we've, as the project manager of this project, how I think about this is ultimately what we're trying to produce is a fee structure that is legally defensible.

And there's a lot of case law, which I think we linked to some examples in the agenda bill to MSRC that describe different cases and how nexus and proportionality are determined. And what FCS, our consultant, was tasked to do was provide us a legally defensible methodology for imposing impact fees. And I think what they've presented accomplishes that. And that's just a good way to help kind of frame some of the decisions we make around implementing the fees. So at a high level, we want to just run back through the basics of the formulas used to create the impact fees.

Both the parks and transportation fees are based on looking at the capital project lists, growth estimates, and are used then to derive a fee amount. So in the case of transportation impact fees, we look at the capital projects list, which was included and adopted by reference through the comp plan by way of the TMP. We look at growth trips growth in new person trips. And essentially, this looks this uses the comprehensive plan's growth methodology of assuming 2,100 units of new growth, which translates to about 6,000 people. And it says, Okay, that's our growth estimate for twenty years.

We divide that by the cost of our projects, and that gives us a fee amount. And I think it's helpful to pause here for just a second and look at the projects list because we've gotten some really good questions from commissioners about the inputs here on the project list. And I think it's a fair conversation to have. And they're really good questions about why does TR L why is that coming to $15,700,000 but 0% eligibility? Ultimately, what this list is providing us for our purposes here tonight is an output in the bottom right hand corner.

And what that output is is the amount of the capital projects that are eligible for funding through transportation impact fees. And eligibility for each project is what has been assessed by DKS, one of our transportation consultants. And what they do essentially is look how much of this project will be built to support new growth. So the projects that are rated 100 are projects that don't exist today. So when they get built, they're fully there to support new growth.

The projects that have a smaller percentage means maybe you're adding on some multimodal systems or lanes of travel that will support new growth in the future. But the road already exists. The main pipeline already exists. You might be adding a small improvement. So there's there's an analysis method that DKS uses to assess how much each project is eligible to support impact fees. But that's a bit granular. Ultimately, the bottom right corner is the output of this table that we kind of want to focus on. Go ahead.

Yeah, one other thing to consider with this table is that this table will change periodically as the city continues to plan for the future, as we continue to refine what the city's priorities are, as we continue to build new projects and learn where additional work and funds need to be spent to build out the network. So this is a snapshot in time of these projects and what we understand their eligibility to be. We are in the process of making some refinements to this list. Our transportation staff are working on what's the right word for it accounting for a new pet bike plan, a transit plan, updates to the transportation master plan. There's a whole host of changes that are underway right now, and those will likely result in this list being changed in about two years.

So if we did go through the process of adopting impact fees and by the way, we're overdue. They were due last year, so we are legally non compliant with the state law on impact fees. So we're overdue. I don't think there's a lot of risk there as long as we get it done this year. But we anticipate that in probably two years we will come back again and not change the formula, but instead we will swap out this table with a new table that is more refined and that is reflective of priorities that the council has given us, that the community has identified, and the methodology to rank those, ensure equity, try to identify the best value for the dollars that we have.

So this piece of information and the Parks' comparable piece of information, the Parks table, is also subject to change as we continue to evaluate how to invest public dollars and infrastructure. So I wanted to really highlight that. That came out of a conversation with a commissioner and we really appreciated feedback on that, but we wanted to clarify that this table will change. And at that time, we will take the new output and we will input that into the formula and it will generate a new impact fee that then the council will consider adopting through the fee schedule. So that is how this works.

One of the challenges in the past was that the old when it was last adopted and the code that we have had doesn't really contemplate how this is updated in the future. We're really trying to address that here and make sure that we're forward thinking. How does it adjust for inflation? How does it adjust periodically at the council's discretion if they choose to want to increase the fees? How does it adjust related to the table here?

Really important piece of this. One other thing before we get into the formula is I wanted to also highlight that impact fees are not the only way in which development provides infrastructure to the city. Development also builds infrastructure that is within the development. So for a subdivision, I think we're all familiar with Highcroft or the Connor Jarvis project that went in, that there are roads, there are sewer, water mains that are extended through the development. There are pocket parks, excuse me, that are developed that are open to the public.

There are trail connections that are brought through the development. Those are another way in which development pays for development, so to speak, in that it's required to provide infrastructure alongside the construction of the project or with the construction of the project. There is one more way in which development provides for improvements in infrastructure, and that is through the State Environmental Policy Act. And when we do a SEPA analysis, there are occasions it's not as common but there are occasions where a system deficiency is identified, that is, where there's a nexus or connection to the project that the project going forward would result in a safety degradation at an intersection, a delay at an intersection or some other form of improvement that needs to be made within proximity of the development, but not within the development, if that makes sense. So through the State Environmental Policy Act, we apply mitigation measures and we obligate the developer to build other improvements that are not funded by impact fees and that are not immediately within the development, but that are necessary to support that development to ensure that our levels of service and our infrastructure standards regarding safety remain.

So hopefully that made sense to us. I wanted to highlight that there are three really primary ways in which development helps build and fund infrastructure.

Next is an overview of the formula of the parks fee calculation. And here, you use the value of the existing parks inventory and the improvements made to derive parks capital value per person. Then you run it through, another formula with estimations of the population growth that match the time span of the project list. Then you look at the percentage of the projects that are eligible for impact fees. You have to consider the other funding sources that would be available to support those project development.

And ultimately, through after all that, you get to the bottom right hand corner that pops out of Park's impact fee. And that's something that FCS ran through in more detail on November 6. So if you have more questions, I would recommend watching that excellent video because I just I think I did all I can do on that. But we'll move on. And this table here shows us the end product of running those calculations.

It generates a new fee for parks and transportation. And in the red boxes there are the scaling fee amounts. So under parks, that top red box, we have a per square foot rate of $3.13 and transportation of $744 We also talked about how the scaling methodology excuse me came up with a minimum and maximum square footage for charging impact fees in an amount associated with that. And that was using occupancy data from the region, the best data they could gather through the American Community Survey and census data to estimate. Again, it's an estimation of the number of people kind of per square foot to to give us a minimum and maximum amount, we can charge, defensively for impact fees.

To put it in context, we wanted to bring back a comparison to neighboring and pure cities. And this isn't fully current in that some of these cities have yet to implement scaling methodologies and some have. But you can see how our newly calculated fees are ultimately pretty similar to our existing fee amounts at their base value, and that's before you apply scaling. But I think it's helpful to see it in context. FCS produced a report that captures a methodology.

And ideally, you'd be able to read that report from top to bottom and understand fully each of the inputs and the data and the decisions made about the fees and how they were calculated. The report will be incorporated by reference in the draft code that we're going to show at the second part of the presentation, with the idea being that instead of trying to codify the formula and put it in code where it's hard to change and it would take a long, cumbersome process to do it, referencing it out to this report gives us a little bit more flexibility when the time comes, when we're ready to hit recalculate, when we might have a new project list. So that's the ideology the idea behind keeping the report as a reference versus codifying the formulas. And what we're looking for is the commission had some time with the report. So really, we want your feedback on how it reads.

We got some emails from folks about sections for additional clarification, which we appreciate, and we'll pass on to our consultant. And then just what questions or thoughts you have. So we'll pause there for questions. And I think David?

I also in addition to the comments this evening from the public, I did want to draw your attention to a letter that was received from the master builders. And the general gist of that letter is that they'd like to see us consider impact fee reductions for 30% to 80% area median income housing developments. Currently, the way it's proposed, we are waiving impact fees for we're proposing to waive impact fees for projects that have a 0% to 30% deep affordability as those generally are public policy driven. They're partially publicly funded, publicly coordinated. However, the 30% to 80% range is an area of opportunity that if the commission wanted to recommend to the council a reduced fee instead of a waiver, that might be appropriate.

But I did want to highlight that letter. We're also being commended on some of the code language that we have and some of the provisions around flexibility for deferral and credit for other like improvements in that letter just the same. So I wanted to provide some a summary of what that letter says.

So you're looking for comments so far? Yes. Anybody want to make comments so far? Zayed, go ahead.

A couple of simple things. The list that you with the numbers, 100% and all that. The list of four projects down the bottom, I don't know if there is any significance as far as they don't have the project number. What does that mean? There are four projects down the bottom?

We'd be happy to ask our transportation counterparts. Thank you.

Question about the guidelines that we have right now. If the developer is committed to make the Frontage improvement, can they use that in lieu of the impact fee?

They cannot. However, if they continue a frontage improvement off-site in anticipation of other development that will likely come soon, they can get credit for that much like a latecomer you would get.

Exactly what is going get into it. The latecomer agreement is available. You may want to explain what is the latecomer agreement.

Yes. So I think the easiest way to understand that is in the case of a development that requires a sewer extension to service the development. So say you want to develop a property that is a few 100 feet north of where the sewer main currently ends, you would be required to extend the public sewer main to the extent of the property, the boundary of the property, whereby you could then connect your new development to that sewer main. And you would be obligated to build the entire extension of that sewer main. However, you would be eligible as a developer over time to receive credit back or payment back for that investment from latecomer payments.

So if one of the neighbors who then would take advantage of that sewer line down the road from you was to develop. They would be required to, at the point of connection, pay their proportionate share of the development of that sewer line. A similar line of thinking is in impact fees, we have system credits. Instead of latecomer, it has a different terminology. There is a section in our draft code that's included, I think it's exhibit two, does talk about how that would work in the case where somebody built additional improvements as part of their development that they could then be credited back for.

They can credit it against their impact fees, or we could set it up as a latecomer. It wouldn't be in the impact fee chapter because it's managed a different way.

And this latecomer agreement or off-site improvement that we were talking about, if the developer is willing to, doesn't have to be adjacent to the property, does it?

No, it does not. It could be it has to be within a reasonable geographic proximity.

Because I remember a case that we had to deal with it in Bothell that they we condition approval of the plan based on the signal, installation of a signal only four, five blocks away, but there was a nexus between the development and the improvement to that intersection, and they had to pay for the signalization of that intersection. That's why I brought it up. Back to the off-site improvement. In addition to the off-site improvement, what happens to the additional dedication of right of way that is required?

So dedication of right of way would typically be required immediately in front of a project. We can't require a developer to dedicate right of way from land they don't own. So dedication usually occurs right along the frontage of a property where it fronts a public road and there is a plan to widen that road for the proper road section. Dedication is required and that's a fourth way. That's a really good point. So dedication is required in addition to impact fees, site improvements and system and other SIPA mitigation improvements.

I'm just getting to it one by one. So back to that, let's say the developer is obligated to provide for at his or her own cost and dedicate right away and pay for the impact fee. And on top of that, maybe additional requirements through the CEPA, right? All of the above.

Correct.

There one slide talk about the blended impact fee. Can you elaborate on that? What does that mean?

I'll do my best. So my understanding of blended impact fee is essentially you'll remember on the previous slide up here, there was an impact fee

There for

a slide on that.

Single family housing units and multifamily housing So FCS generated a new fee amount for single family and multifamily. But then they used the proportion they looked at the entire city and the proportion of multifamily units that we have, which is quite small, and then looked at the percentage of single family units and used those proportions then to create a blended fee amount. So that's I don't know if that made any sense at all. David, you can check me if it did. But it's using ultimately the ratio that we have currently of multifamily units and single family units and those two fee amounts and proportionally bringing them together.

So the ultimate blended fee amount reflects the housing makeup of the city.

When I looked at the numbers and initially, I thought that is average between $17.04 $5.05 and $63.60. But when you add them up divided by two, doesn't come to a

Yeah.

It was not It

would be something like what's it? Multifamily, we've got what? About 10 or something like that. It'd be like ten ten ninety would be the ratio, something like that. And that's how they got to the the blended fee amount.

And what would be the, when we say maximum fee, what does that mean?

So the maximum fee amount is is what FCS, through looking at estimations of occupancy, which is something we talked about in the previous meetings, is where they think legally, defensively, we could that's the maximum fee amount we could charge based on occupancy data. And remember that the point of impact fees is to offset the impact of the new people who are coming to live in the housing units. Not it's not they're not meant to offset the size of the home, right? So looking at occupancy data, there's a curve where it says, you know, when you get to about 2,500 square feet of home size, occupancy doesn't keep increasing. It kind of levels off.

And so at that point, that's the data is telling us that that's about the maximum point which you can expect. If a home grows, more people will come. Therefore, there would be more impact on the system.

Can we give Ajay a chance here? Think Can he had

you go back to a couple of slides, the formula slide? Slide? Want to ask you a question.

Yeah, transportation or parks?

Go back to, no, the parks one. Yeah, Here. You know what? Let me change my this one. Let's go to the table that you had. Yeah. So here, what just so that I understand it, this is basically an impact fee per occupant as as related to new occupants, new people who move into the location. Or is this calculated for everyone in the city right now, considering everyone in the city right now, but then will get charged only to the new occupants?

It's based the the you can see here right in the middle of this slide, population growth and up here, growth in new New person. In new person trip ends. So it's based on growth projections.

Growth projections.

Yep. Which come from the comprehensive plan.

You're right. Yep. So we we base it on growth projections. Projections. Right?

Right? I I want wanna to go back to the comment that was made when we started this that it was 70 people who moved into Suramish when 2,000 people moved into or 20,000 people, I don't remember, moved into Redmond. Would the calculation that you have with the $32,000,000 calculation that you have, see I remember the number of the dollars much better than everything else. So the $32,000,000 one, wouldn't that change when we see lesser people coming in and lesser revenue coming in? And if that is the case, don't we risk ourselves to say, okay, this is the impact fee, x is the impact fee that we will have.

At some point, we will have so much of construction that all of this will help or so much of services that all of this will help and we will get to those connectors and all those things that we have planned for. And now suddenly, we see a shortfall between the two of them. Aren't we setting us ourselves up for a failure with that kind of an approach? So And before you say, before you say that, yeah, we will reevaluate this as we are growing, I don't even know where that metric would be to reevaluate ourselves.

However, keep in mind that the purpose of impact fees is to account for and fund proportionate share of infrastructure for new development that has to be online roughly within six years of when people arrive. So state law says that we have to plan for delivery of infrastructure within six years of when people basically move in, a development occurs. So I think one of the challenges there is trying to predict the rate of development and trying to understand how much it takes to get a project off the ground to make the improvements, how much of that funding will be from REIT, will be from general fund tax dollars, will be from impact fees, will be from grants. And that mix is constantly changing because one thing we don't control is well, there are several things we don't control but one of the things we don't control is the rate of development.

Yeah.

There are so many factors that feed into rate of development that it's unpredictable.

Right. Well, and I'll just add that it kind of comes back to that preface at the beginning of the goal of the project here is to find a methodology that's legally defensible. And it's not to come up with a perfect model that tracks current conditions as they change. It's using an established method for predicting or estimating growth through the I

am not at all questioning the method. The method is understood. It's clear. I agree with it 100%. I'm just talking of the impact of the impact fees given on on this on this city's balance sheet when we plan for it. If now that number is in my head, 32,235,000.000, right? It's going to be in my head for some time. I'm not the only person. It's going to be in everybody's head to think that there is so much money that is going to be planned based on the impact fee, which means that we will plan projects based on that. And it's not that you will get the project, you will get the money and then you will start the work.

You will start doing the work assuming that that money is coming. But what when there is a trough in the number of people moving in and suddenly your impact fee which was based out of new people, new residents is now not meeting that. That shortfall will have to be met by, I don't know, impact fee on existing residents. Isn't that a risk? Or would we triage the project to say, okay, we wanted to build a Southeast 4th connector. Tough luck.

Mean, I

think How do that?

That is a possibility. There's always a reassessment of which projects are feasible and needed and prioritized by the council. So I think I mean, that's pretty much an annual process. And I think also it could be a good moment to then reassess our impact fee program and look at the current data at the time, rerun the formulas, come up with new fees so we're better able to estimate our yes.

And that will be an annual exercise.

I mean, in theory, it could be. We wouldn't recommend we do that annually necessarily. And that's kind of one of the questions we talked about at previous meetings with the commission is, is there a cadence that makes sense? I don't think we've landed on anything in particular. But I think both of those methods is, one, you could look at recalculating and estimating how much revenue you could expect through impact fees based on growth trends. Or you could scratch projects off because maybe we don't need a Southeast connector road or whatever the example is.

Yes, you're on point. Seeing how much we love the impact fee discussion, I think if we come annually, don't think I'll complain.

One thing to keep in mind also is that we cannot hold impact fees collected for more than ten years or we are obligated to refund them back to the now property owners.

Yeah.

Yeah that complicates it too but we'll hold that for another day.

Also the impact fee you guys you don't do it every year. You do it every what five years, ten years?

I mean that's been our pace currently.

John, did you have something?

Just so we don't forget, do you want to pick up Souda first?

How about you, Souda? Any comments so far or questions?

Thank you, John. No, I'm good actually. Yeah. Thank you. Okay.

Go ahead, John.

I always forget the online people. Somehow, Hisham managed to tele transport himself. Beam me down, Scotty.

I'm not gonna miss the treats. Okay.

I'm gonna start off to show Evan that I did my reading assignment. The very second sentence of the introduction says, Sammamish has seen its population steadily increase over the last five years, period. That didn't really happen. We haven't had much growth in the last five years. I would ask FCS to revisit that.

In the past, there's been some really fast growth, but not in the last five years. So let's move on to more serious stuff. So there's been some talk tonight of Redmond, Nisquah, which, by the way, were cities formed in the eighteen late eighteen hundreds. Sammamish is a relatively new community and kinda building from scratch. I as many of you know, I lived up here in 1980.

Dulane on 228th, Sadler's was the only store on the entire plateau. Klahani was just getting started. So our growth, well, most a lot of it was under the county and then into the early years of the cities, really relied on whatever impact fees and county funding and early city funding we can get our hands on. And as we move into this decade with our budget forecast not looking so good, impact fees become critical to our future in order to mitigate any development growth. That's just editorial on my my comment.

There have been some comments online that maybe we should look at more refined studies, more more granular. And my supposition here is FCSG or now FCS went with metrics and studies that were highly defensible and could be legally held up. And I'm seeing nods from staff there. So while it might be desirable to look more deeply and more granularly, we also have to be legally defensible. I guess my last last comment here in the range of things is having some discussion about what we do with the 30 to 80% calculation.

David mentioned this in his opening remarks that personally, I would like to see some sort of reduction or proportional reduction to make that possible as much as we can. Hopefully, it's a de minimis impact to the bottom line. But that I think in terms of our discussion tonight, that to me seems like the biggest issue.

That's it. Thanks, John. Mike? Yeah.

Well, that's a good lead in for me because the first thing I had up here was that piece of unaffordability. And I think that's a council decision, frankly. But what I would recommend is maybe similar to you to have a proportional from like zero at the, what, 31% and then to whatever that blended rate is at the 80%. Pretty straightforward. The second thing is and I understand about the legally defensible.

It is interesting that the tables with the impact fees show us, especially for transportation, being on the high side when our projected growth is low. So if you say, well, you know, we've got Redmond growing like mad. And I don't know if they've done their impact fee adjustment yet or not. I don't think so. Not.

But I would wonder and this is for the consultant, something to ask the consultant if it's legally defensible that we would have so many projects that support growth when we're not expecting very much growth in the comprehensive plan. It feels a little bit out of line. The blended rate, I guess I can get my arms around why and how it was calculated. But the question would be is there a way to have a rate for single family and a rate for multifamily instead of just blending them. There's an assumption in there which I would expect that they must have made that the rate of multifamily construction is going to be similar to what it's been in the past.

If that changes in any significant way, then maybe the blended rate isn't as beneficial. That's the question. That's for the experts, the consultants

That's to great question.

And then this is down in the weeds a little bit. I sent a bunch of little comments about where the report was a little bit lacking in the clarity. I would change the name of the report to the methodology because it says study so that it's something enduring. And the methodology should be able to be super clear so it could be picked up in a couple of years and people really follow it. And a lot of the comments I made were like, how did they get to that? You know, there was a leap of something or another in there. And part of my thinking in that is with just a little bit more put in the details, we should be able to do those calculations without using a consultant.

It's So a great comment. Thank you.

Thanks, Mike. Hushal?

Thank you, Mark. I agree with what John and Mike just recommended about the scaled impact fee for those kinds of homes, even though I lean towards the zero more than the higher end. But I think if you go with a scaled one, it's a reasonable approach. During the comments, Paul made a comment that I tend to agree with too about do we need more parks? And I know I asked in the past, do we have enough parks per capita?

And how does it compare to other cities? Again, I feel that we have enough parks, but I this is just without having any numbers to refer to, but I bet Paul does. And the third one that I have in mind, which again, we discussed the last time, it's how do you come up with the overall value of the parks. And I think when I was reviewing document that you guys shared with us a few days ago, the value of the donated parks were included. And that was my point in the past that those should actually offset offset the impact fee because it's free land.

But when I looked at your overall valuation of the parks that the city currently own, you included the value of that land, which increased the cost of having new parks. That's all what I Two

quick things for me. In terms of the comments about affordability, I think that everybody seems to be in fairly good agreement that we should consider that. I would say, I think as we do the math, we should make sure that if we're making adjustments or adding complication to the system that it should be in a way that in that makes housing more affordable in a meaningful way. So I think sometimes we can get caught up in the numbers and we're talking about a 800,000 or a million dollar dwelling unit house and we're talking about $500 of reduction and creating all of this processing burden to accomplish almost something that nobody will even pay attention to. So I do think and that's why at the 30% AMI level, whatever the number is at that point, it's definitely more meaningful to do something.

But the further you go, it's potential there's a point in time where I think it's worth considering whether it's meaningful anymore and it's really accomplishing anything to reduce that impact fee. So that's one comment for you guys to consider in the future. The other one would be the more So we You know, you've asked a few times ideas about how periodically this gets revisited. It seems logical to me kind of from a gut reaction is that this whole exercise gets done every five years so that way it kind of lines up with the comp plan, And then the sort of just redoing the table and rerunning the numbers. The more automated that can be, the more frequent that can happen.

I almost sense that maybe every year might be too much because it's just it goes by pretty quick. So maybe it's like every two years there's an automatic, you know. But again, if it's if it's really truly automatic enough that it's just, you know, pay the consultant to redo the table and plug the numbers in and publish them, maybe then every year is fine. But it does feel like maybe there's not again enough meaningful results out of that to do it every single year. It may not really change things very much.

So now the only downside of my suggestion is that two doesn't go into five, so there's probably something about that that doesn't work very well, but I think the five years would be the main thing so that it kinda lines up with the comp plan and enough time has gone by to then actually do some reevaluation of what's changed in the economy and the community. But if you can more or less automate the number updates, then maybe that can be

pretty frequent. So thank you for that. The way the code currently reads in its draft form is that it automatically updates every year by way of index, whichever index we use. We talked about that with one of the commissioners. So we're going to be looking into the best indexes locally applicable to use given that there are national indexes that don't really reflect costs here in this region.

So the other thing to keep in mind is that every five years we're required to report out to Commerce on our Commerce PSRC in the county on our implementation of our comp plan and how many units we've produced in different AMIs, that's a good time to reflect on how much growth we've had. It kind of gets at the question that Ajay was talking about with regard to how do we know if we're funding these projects properly. So that is the five years does make sense. Then there's also the other so there's really three methods of update that we we currently have two, right? We don't have that five years in there, but we do have the annual increase that's that's pegged to an indexed inflation number, cost of materials, etcetera.

Cost The next one is the one that we've talked about, which is whenever we replace that table in there that is the result of transportation planning work and parks planning work, right? So that every time the transportation or staff redo the let me get

it wrong,

the TFCP transportation facilities

T Capital Improvement Plan and Transportation Improvement Plan.

The TCIP. The TCIP. Sorry. I apologize, I'm not a transportation person. Whenever they do that, and that is not necessarily on a symmetrical schedule. It really depends on a wide range of things, how frequently they do that. But ideally, we'd like to have the formula flushed out so that we simply go back through it, identify eligibility, and then take a fee schedule update to the city council based on that. Right? So that's the middle update. And then there's that big update that could happen five years. It could also be every ten years when we do our comp plan because we are under GMA on a ten year cycle for updating the comp plan. So it really just depends. I think there's a bunch of different ways to do that.

Yes. I guess my response to that is that knowing something about how construction cost indices are put together, you could start to drift quite a ways off track. And and also, I think that this table right here could actually be way more influential in the exercise of recalculating because a new council gets elected and the list of projects changes and somebody decides, wait, we had the wrong percentage here and whatever it is, right? That feels like that could be as influential in affecting the numbers as any 3% per year average cost index is. And so again, though that requires effort and budget and time and so there's got to be

a balance. Right. I think one other thing about this table that I want to highlight is that over time, our priorities as a community evolve and so does the blend of priorities related to multimodal transportation, right? So you might start to see that more projects show up that are related to pedestrian safety or pedestrian mobility or our PedBike plan, transit. And there's a decline in the number of projects that might show up that are related to purely moving cars around the city.

It really reflects the priorities and those do change over time. So I think that's an opportunity. And as you say, it is the most influential because that box in the lower right is ultimately what feeds into formula.

Can I just so this is part of the draft code, and I had a comment about that? So currently, if I remember correctly, it does talk about the inflation adjustment every year. And then further adjustments are based on what council decides. And my thinking was that there needed to be a trigger that would cause the council to at least think about whether there should be an update and the table is that. And that should be written into the code to make that clear. Not that you have to do it, council could still decide not to bother, but if there's an update to the table, that would be a trigger to consider it during a council meeting.

So to that point, the table is going to have to be updated every two years in the budget cycle anyway, correct?

I think so.

Yes. But the project on that list has to be changed based on changes in the TIP and the CIP.

Right. And so rather than doing inflation adjustment wholesale, I think the consensus seems to be that as this table is updated with project changes, cost changes, that's a better indicator of and easier because the work had to be done anyway.

So suggesting removing the index cost and the inflation, the index cost increase and instead replacing it with a clear just follow the budget cycles, which typically with a budget adoption, there is an amendment to the fee schedule that happens with that. Right.

There is a danger to that approach is that when you update the TIP, TIP is done at the staff level and the staff level, they don't get into changes in the construction costs and all that to put the TIP together. They make a straight forward adjustments, let's say, 10% or 20%, but they don't go actually by the cost and the construction changes. So that's the danger of that.

Yes. And if that's the case, then there are larger problems to deal with than just this because if our transportation plan is reflecting inaccurate

No, it's not inaccurate. I'm saying that it doesn't have that level of accuracy, right, than using the indexing. The indexing is much more.

Okay. What else?

One small net. Can you go back to the table? Sorry. The table, yes. The TR one one five and then I cannot see. Sahali Way corridor improvements to Northeast 8th Street to city limits. It says to city limits. I thought everything is city limits until I saw that. Like, doesn't that

I think that's saying that that segment of road improvement extends from Northeast 8th up Sahali all the way to the city limits.

Correct. Yeah. But it is down to this It's it's not all the way down to the light. It's probably down to the this one.

I guess maybe it Yeah. Northeast 8th Street, two city limits.

Two city limits. So I I'm like everything is to the city limit. So I didn't know why that was called out as to city limits. So should I read something into it?

So I think one thing we could do is clarify on this table that each of these TRs corresponds to a project that is described in the city's capital facilities plan. So there is a much broader description of each of these. One of the commissioners brought in an example of TFP, I think it was, that had a list of projects. And we have something similar, not quite as clear as that, the one that was shown to us, but there is an opportunity to put a note on here that references where the reader could go to learn more about each of these projects. Got it. I will highlight that I am also curious about TR115.05 and why it is only 1,226,000

Yeah.

I don't know what we're getting for that great run of road for $1260000.001260000.00 dollars Exactly. And it's only 15% attributable to Exactly. Capacity for new development.

So something there are a lot of questions that came up on that point, but again, we'll calculate that.

One additional comment. And I there's a strong desire on our part, on the consultant's part, on the commission's part, on the community's part to want to have a very precise granular level model. One of the challenges that we end up with is for implementation when we're dealing with alternative calculations or we're dealing with a developer wanting us to provide a foundation or basis that is legally defensible, that we, to some degree, need to keep it simple. We were meeting in earlier today with Lake Washington School District cities where we're about how to implement school impact fees using the bedroom count methodology. And one of the challenges is that it's so complicated that it is going to cost a significant amount of staff time to implement.

One of the biggest expenses the city has in its budget is staff time. So the degree to which we add more complexity and make things more complicated, we then find ourselves then having to hire additional staff to implement that. So we're trying to find the right balance between something that is detailed enough for us to understand it and have confidence in it, but at the same time not be so granular that we can't implement it without hiring a dedicated staff person just to implement it, which might cost more than what you collect in actual impact fees.

For this Sahali one that we were just talking about, if we take it to the city limits and we don't do what's left between city limits and two zero two, I think it will diminish the value of what we did. But I know that it's not part of what

where we can go and fix and spend some ambitious money, but we somehow have to figure out a way to work with Redmond or whoever owns the King County, whoever owns that remaining part.

There was a really interesting study that was done a number of years ago on the stretch of 202 from 520 all the way out to, was it, 2 44th? And it looked at those intersections. There had been past council conversations years ago about adding the grey barn down at the bottom of the hill and the property adjoining that intersection as a potential annexation area for the city, that would necessitate moving the urban growth boundary, which is attainable. There's quite a bit of work that has to go into that. But once the city then owns the property in its jurisdiction, meaning that it's within the city's jurisdiction, we could then take over the right of way.

We could then own that side of the intersection and we'd have more of a seat at the table in that conversation. There are steps to take to do that. It's not something that I think is out of the picture, but it would take several years to achieve that.

Is there anything that a council can do at this point to expedite that process?

To do that, a citizen a citizen a community member change the terminology would need to file a docket request or the council could direct staff to submit a city docket request, which would the first step would be to pursue amendment to the comprehensive plan to modify our potential annexation areas, which we then would immediately get routed into a conversation with King County at the regional planning group and also into the boundary review board where we would be talking about moving the urban growth boundary. But the trigger to start that process would be filing a docket.

So just a quick comment on the Sahali Way project. What we can't see is what transportation has done to coordinate with King County. Very often in a project like that, they've already been talking to the adjoining property. I mean, you look at the boundaries between Bellevue and Redmond, you walk across the street, you have no idea who's managing that traffic light because there's agreements put in place. So I don't know if it's footnoted in the CIP or if we have to look at the county CIP.

It could also be a lot easier just to get an interlocal in place, where you have an interlocal agreement with King County to address how everybody's role is going forward with that intersection. There's other examples. The 145th Street corridor between Shoreline and Seattle is notorious because that is both a it's a King County road, it's a state highway, and half of it's in Shoreline and half of it's in Seattle. And it's also identified as a major now sound transit route for bus service to serve the 148th Street Light rail station. They were able to achieve that, and they're in the process of rebuilding the whole thing. They did figure out how to work between all those parties. So there are models where that does work.

Well, it's worth it because we've got a lot of issues about that section. We are talking about threefour of mile section between the city limit and the two zero two signal. I

have

a question about one table showing that, Evan, that says transportation fee calculation method. Can you bring that slide up? Right. So in here, we're talking about the first part on the left, growth in person trip ends. Since we're talking about the number of occupants, if it goes by the number of occupants, let's say, years old child doesn't have a trip end but is an occupant, how are going to deal with that kind of situation?

So the occupancy is just used to determine the minimum and maximum fee amounts. It's not used in calculating the amount charged for the impact fee. So the occupancy is again used to it's an estimation of when a new housing unit is developed, how many people would live in the unit based on its size.

And who is that called?

It's looking at The US census data for the region. And the occupancy then, that data was used to determine the at seven eighty three square feet is the bottom limit you have you described this well last time, David, of sorry to put you on the spot. But like, no you can't have a half person living in the unit. And we we maybe take over this bit because I I'm finding the the 08:00 hour slowing slowing myself down. So

just so that I understand, what you're saying is that this is an approximation based on the population that we are looking at and not like a per person toll. No. You quantified. Is it trip ends number of trips?

Yeah. So that that the trip ends here is an estimation of future growth. Right? That is converting the estimated future growth over twenty years based on the comp plan number of 2,100 housing units, 57, 75 people. And it's estimating of those 2,100 units, how many trips would you generate in a year based on that growth. And so that's where the trip ends is. And that is a different process and a different function than what the occupancy data is doing. Ultimately, the occupancy data is looking at where to set your minimum fee amount and maximum fee amount. So they're separate but related.

Okay. Can we move on?

Yeah. That'd be great. So now we'll shift to the second portion where we talk about the draft impact fee code. And that's how we implement the impact fees. It's done locally through the Samaritan municipal code.

And when we went through the update process with FCS, it was part of their scope to look at the existing code and make recommended edits so we can implement the scaling fees. And when they gave that back to us, and David and I took a look at what they proposed, it was all good edits. But what we realized is our current code is spread out. Currently, impact fees covers five different sections in two different chapters of the SMC. There's a lot of duplicative language kind of inherently when you repeat sections across the code.

There's a lot of just language directly pulled from the RCW, copy and pasted from the RCW. So we thought this would be a good moment when we're recalculating the fees to clean up the code and come with something new. So we proposed a repeal and rewrite, which is what we'll be looking at here. And just to note, this is the first draft. We've gone through a little internal review. But count our legal office has yet to take a look at this. And the idea here is we want to hear any feedback you have. We want to finish up our internal review process before legal takes a look at it. So just as a disclaimer, legal hasn't given this its blessing yet, but we hope they will one day.

So the final product would be redlining the existing

It's a repeal replace. So we're we'd scratch what exists.

But you redline it. You bring it up like what you did on the code amendment.

No. The red lines would be cross out everything that exists now and look at our brand new one. So what you'll see in review will be and what you did review as exhibit two is the new proposed code, just clean?

It's an entirely new numerical section that is not currently in the code. So it's a new 20 one-six-forty five. There are three other sections of code that are completely different areas of the code that would be repealed, right? So we would repeal parks impact fees section, we would repeal transportation impact fees section, and we would repeal school impact fees section.

And deferrals. And deferrals. Yeah. And there's one more again. There's a fourth section. There's five total.

Wow. Five sections. And we would move all of those into one consolidated section that is streamlined and it's focused on accessibility to the average person. And it also will help with implementation because when a project pays one impact fee, they pay all of them, right? So what's happening right now is staff, community members, developers are having to go to all these different places in the code to try and understand what they have to pay for impact fees and how those work. So we're putting it in one place that is accessible. That's the idea.

So the structure here is on the right, you see the new table of contents for the draft code. In the next slides, we'll just go through each section and at a high level kind of talk about what they do. I'll ask David to stop me at any point and further describe some of the stuff that each of these sections do. But first up is purpose authority limitations. And it provides the purpose statement.

The goal here is to implement the comprehensive plan and the capital facilities element within. It's to respond and to follow state code that allows us to impose impact fees for funding public facilities. It describes some of the limitations and defines here and this is really an administrative point for us. It defines which directors are responsible for making decisions about each fee type. Currently, I think it is a little ambiguous, and it often comes to David to make a decision on a parks fee.

We've clarified that the parks director should make determinations regarding parks fees, public works for transportation, and community development would do school and fee administration. So that's defined right up front to help the user kind of understand who to go to regarding questions about their fees.

Can I ask you a quick question in here before we

go further? Early on in one of the first slide, you briefly mentioned about fire. Who does the fire calculation as far as the impact?

We don't assess fire impact

Not fees in at all.

No. We

should put a pin in that for a future conversation because that's an opportunity there.

Not tonight. So next section is applicability and service area. The RCW requires that define A or multiple service areas. And to keep it simple, we've just defined the city as the service area for applying and using impact fees. It also establishes that we can assess impact fees for projects neighboring the city that create impacts within the city.

And it further defines that the school impact fee service area correspond to each district's boundary. Anything to add there? Impact fee assessment collection and accounting. Yeah, so this states that who is required to pay impact fees. It's an applicant seeking a development approval that will create additional demand on systems.

So that would end up excluding de minimis projects. You're building permits for doing small remodels or renovations or building a fence or stuff that don't create additional demand on system capacity. It states clearly that it must be proportionate to the share of the cost of infrastructure. It establishes that credits can be awarded when applicable, like the scenarios David described earlier. And it's the first establishment of the reference of the city's fee schedule saying that the impact fees will be incorporated and applied through the city's fee schedule.

The next section is exemptions, which further lays out when impact fees don't apply. So examples are affordable housing to continue to be defined through, and we appreciate your suggestions tonight, and we'll work with the council more on that. Public projects, schools, stuff that the city's building, minor improvements, redevelopment of equal or less value or use, change of use resulting in no additional impacts, and what's the typo there? And then reconstruction after damage. Let's say you have a fire and you need to rebuild, you're exempt from the impact fees.

Question? What is a manual improvement?

It's kind of like what we were talking if I was doing something small on my house, new siding, small

Yeah. Not adding square footage renovations.

Not adding square footage.

So the next three sections, EFG, I believe, are about each of the individual fee amounts. And what these sections do is just define where those fee formulas can be found and generalizes how they were calculated. They point to the impact fee. And I really like Commissioner Bresco's recommendation, the impact fee methodology as the place to go to find how these fees are calculated. It, again, references that the fee amounts can be found in the fee schedules.

And it carries over the current council direction of implementing a 75% developer obligation for school impact fees. And that came from a few years ago, past council's direction. Impact fee rates and impact fee rate updates. This is where we make the dynamic reference to the city's fee schedule and goes through a couple of the methodologies we discussed earlier about how to update the impact fees. One was through the indexing.

And then the second method, which we talked about earlier, was through council direction. I think we heard good feedback tonight that we should consider amending that to following updates of the capital improvement plan, which I think makes a lot of sense. And then it also clarifies that school impact fees are updated is it biannually? Yeah, through adopting the school district's capital facilities plans and essentially taking their system and their fee amounts, adopting them by reference, and then starting that pass through system that we have in place. Deferral so here is this section ultimately is used to create a way to delay payments of impact fees if needed by an applicant.

A situation where this might apply is, let's say, you have a large developer and they have a cash flow to conserve cash flow for building, they want to defer paying the impact fees until a later date, the options we're providing? Or is that the time of preliminary or final inspection, which I believe is also with the temporary occupancy and certificate of occupancy point, or closing of the first sale of the property. So it provides some optionality for applicants. This section defines the processes and when and the timing requirements associated with the deferrals and also defines the deferral term, how long you can delay those payments, and what happens if you don't make the payments. And this is a process that's required by the RCW.

Impact fee credits and adjustment. This is something that we kind of touched on earlier through the conversation. But it's used to provide applicants credit towards impact fees for improvements that they've made that that can be attributed to adding system capacity. So I think we hit on that pretty well earlier. But this section of the code implements that.

It defines the process, how credits would be assessed and awarded through an appraisal process and how the appraiser must be credentialed, that sort of thing. And it's important to note that, again, these have to be credits. They have to be awarded to capacity adding projects that are included in the CIP. Independent fee calculations. So this is a section that would be used in scenarios where the land use table and the transportation section or the applicant feel that they can't accurately capture the impact amount of their development.

Again, it's something that's required by the RCW to give applicants that flexibility. And this section defines how that process would work oh, go ahead and how those responsibilities would be divided up in the cost for that process. Impact fee accounts and refunds. The RCW states that impact fees must be spent within ten years of return. So this captures that, talks about that process.

The RCW also requires that impact fees are held in an interest bearing account. And it specifies that we have to do reporting. So our section includes language here that we'll report annually on the city's website and will provide the council with a written report on the revenues generated from the impact fee program and the amount held in the accounts and so forth.

Question on some of the big projects and particularly a good example is the Sahali Way. Sahali Way has a history more than the age of the city. So over the years, have been collecting funds from from developers. Have have we had the case that we had to return the money that we collected for Sahali?

I'm not aware of us having to return funds yet. However, there are, as you suggest, there has been an accrual of funds collected over time and those funds do need to be expanded here fairly soon. It is challenging to get projects off the ground, larger projects off the ground. Sometimes smaller projects might be more appropriate to move forward with that type of fee because it's something that's attainable in a shorter period.

And when the city is obligated to return the money, do you have to pay for the accrued interest on it?

You do. There is a requirement for that. And it is a lot of staff time to figure out how to calculate that, how to refund it. So we would rather not go through that. I've been through another city. Had to go through that and it was a lot of work.

The next section is periodic review of impact fees. Again, part of the conversation we had earlier, and this would apply to the fees we have control over, so parks and transportation impact fees, and defines that the impact fees would be reviewed on a periodic basis to reflect the current CIP, which I think does capture kind of the direction we had tonight. So that's that's good. Appeals is next. This is used when an applicant doesn't agree with the assessed impact fees or some of the decisions made by the relevant directors through the process.

This section defines the appeal process, which would go through the hearing examiner, and it sets the time limits for appeals and again how that would work. Anything to add on that one?

Yeah, if you go back to deferral, Section I, I just wanted to highlight that deferral is required by state law. However, state law sets a minimum requirement for deferral of 10 units. We are allowed to go beyond that. We as a city have not adopted the 10 units. We have allowed more than 10 to be deferred.

But I wanted to say that is a decision point for us, that if we wanted to limit deferral to 10 units, we could. Personally, based on my experience working with developers, I don't see the benefit of limiting it to 10 units. There are some pretty stringent requirements put on property through liens that are recorded that require that it be paid prior to the property being closing at escrow, if you will. So if they want to get occupancy, they have to pay the fee, but you could also defer it. You could give them occupancy, but they can't sell the property until the lien is released as part of escrow.

Let's see. Get back to where we appeals. Oh, appeals was the last one. So to summarize, we talked about this earlier, but the next steps is we'll be visiting the council on February 3 and giving a present kind of their first introduction to the impact fees and the work that's done. FCS will be joining us that night.

And we'll take any feedback or thoughts they have and come back to the planning commission and see where we're at. It could mean another workshop if we get some direction from council to rethink things. Or if they kind of give a head nod that the direction makes sense, we could be coming back with a public hearing and looking for a recommendation. And here, I put on the slide here that the recommendation could include a number of things, like recalculating fees following CIP updates, which is something that we talked about, reducing using that discretion to potentially reduce fee amounts as appropriate. So start kind of thinking about that in the back of your head when you're finding yourself not here on a Thursday night.

You could think about what you want to recommend. And once we get the recommendation from the commission in the spring, we'll finish the review process and adoption with the city council. And all those dates are sort of TBD depending on council's priorities and the work plan that we roll out following the retreat. So

Are you planning to share the comments that you heard from the council, from the commission to the council so that

you Yeah. Know Yep. So we things

that we talked about and

Yeah, certainly. Yep. We've been keeping the question and answer matrix as part of the packet, which I think is a great tool for in the council, we'll get that question and answer matrix so they could see the kind of the path we've gone through. And then when we get to the point of recommendation, we'll be sure to include any relevant comments you want the council to know. No, something

about the comments that you heard from us tonight. Would that be included in the staff presentation to the council?

Yes. That we're working on that agenda item internally now. So it's really timely to have this meeting tonight because that feeds directly into final drafting for that agenda item that will have to get published next Friday.

Next Friday.

Yeah. Yep.

So I think the conversation around when to update those kind of comments, the methodology for scaling or for affordable housing at different tiers, those comments will all be included in the agenda pack in part of the presentation.

And reduction fee that Eshan was talking about.

So I had a question and a comment. My question is something about something you said in the presentation. So are impact fees applied to somebody who puts an addition on their house?

Actually, that's something I meant to bring up too as a decision point. That that is a question we have been working through. And I'm curious feedback is Right. You know,

My gut reaction to that, just gut reaction, is that you know capturing like the 90% case, anybody that adds square footage up to like 50% of their existing or some number 30% of their existing should be excluded. I'm almost to the point of saying any addition should be excluded because first off a big part of this calculation has a maximum occupancy based on a square footage and so most houses are probably already there. Now we're saying okay, you're already at 3,000 square feet so in theory you're at the max anyway. How are we even gonna calculate an impact fee for adding a 300 square foot kitchen addition? It feels like additions should to existing housing units that are not Now if somebody takes a two bedroom Rambler and adds a second floor, you could make the argument that that affects occupancy and could affect trips and you know, but but most of the time when somebody's adding on something, I I think most houses are already at the maximum anyway or close to it.

I I just think there's a little trickiness there that probably you should think about before trying to implement this.

And that we have a meeting with FCS tomorrow and one of the items is to discuss this. And I think, too, if the impact fee program is to offset the impacts of new development if the house has been built a while ago, the impacts have been offset already potentially. So we're going to look for their guidance too on if this is even feasible.

The other one is accessory dwelling units and how do we handle accessory dwelling units. And my sense on that and my suggestion for your consideration would be is that accessory dwelling units are accounted for in the total square footage of the home. That if you had a thousand or you know, a 1,200 square foot house and a thousand square foot ADU, you would be paying an impact fee of 2,200 square feet. And that's how that could be accounted for. You could also choose not to charge an impact fee on accessory dwelling units with the intent of trying to promote construction of ADUs in the city.

That's fine too. The challenge is that there was an ADU bill that was passed that says that you cannot charge more than 50% of what the fee would be for a primary unit for an ADU, but that bill was passed the year before the scaling bill was passed. So now we have to scale it, so there is not a fixed rate for a single family residence, for example, a primary residence. But the way I see it is that an ADU, and this is a bit abstract so I'm sorry, but an ADU fits within the square footage of a single family home. So if you are simply looking at the combined square footage of the primary unit and the ADU, that the ADU, based on its size, will never be more than 50% of the fee for the primary unit.

So you're meeting that older ADU bill and you're also still meeting the scaling bill. I feel like we don't need to do anything, and we inherently already do that, except call out for clarity what we do with ADUs. So think about that. You wanted to say, Hey, we recommend not collecting a fee on ADUs, we could thread that into the code. If you wanted us to clarify that ADUs are included in the total square footage of the home that is being collected within the scaled range, we could do that as well.

Really, just sort of at your direction now on this one, I could see it going all different ways and don't really have an opinion on that.

I am a little bit I hope that I'm the only one kind of confused because I asked that question, remember I said that minor improvement, you said zero increase in the square footage. Is that the conversation that you had with Mark? Is that totally different setting? Or is that still is that a improvement?

I think minor improvement is still a zero square footage.

That's So that is different class. That's different issue. That's more

of a home renovation, right? But I think what Mark is saying is that we probably, unless there was a significant increase in square footage, be charging someone charge an impact fee for additions for existing residences.

And we don't have to spell out what is that magic number is that

That we don't

need to go beyond

It's challenging because then what do we do with schools? Because schools, oddly, have chosen to do bedroom counts. And bedroom counts, based on all the city's feedback, are virtually impossible to implement.

There was one slide where you said that the builder has a responsibility of 75% of the impact fee.

School impact fees? Yeah. So what the way the school impact fee works is basically there's a the school each school identifies what the student generation rates are for each housing type that's in their capital facilities plan. They then identify what the total cost of providing school services are for infrastructure, brick and mortar, for those students. Then they ultimately create there's a formula that identifies how much of that can be attributable to new development.

And then historically, the way King County set this up many, many years ago was that the developer then pays half of that. So it was a credit back to the developer, if you will. So the burden on the broader tax base to provide for brick and mortar school facilities fell on the on half of that for new development fell tax on base, half of that fell on the developer instead of 100% going to the developer. Well, back in 2021, 2022, the Smabro City Council took interest in this and wanted us to change that because it was identified that, hey, we should probably be collecting more from a developer to pay towards brick and mortar facilities for schools, given that we have portables and flexible space that we're seeing be used for school space. And therefore, the 75% is more appropriate.

We didn't think we could get to a full 100% of developer obligation. Instead, we thought we could get to 75%. We are the only city that does that. So between Lake Washington, Issaquah and Sohomie Valley school districts, they all use 50% in all the other cities. We are the only city that pays that collects on the district's behalf 75% of that cost from the developer.

Doesn't that burden the schools to work more with Sorry, my son has finished school many years ago, so I forgot the name. The temporary structures that we have. Portables. The portals. Yes. The portables that we have instead of it being actually a capital investment project because then the builder is going to lobby to not do this thing because he has a 75% charge that comes onto it.

Right? Well, first of all, school demographics and forecasting is extremely challenging. So they are constantly forecasting out the number of students that will be moving through their system. Both Lake Washington and Issaquah are seeing a decline over time in their school populations. There is still a plug of students that are moving through the high school years that ultimately will age out of the system.

Snoqualmie Valley has a much younger population and it is seeing an increase in enrollment over time, and it is seeing a need for new brick and mortar to support that. The challenge is that as a school district, they don't want to spend their capital dollars building brick and mortar for a blip in the, you know, a plug in the system of cohort that is just going to go away, then they have to close a school, potentially surplus it, right? Because the school is trying to optimize, and this is something I think that often is misunderstood in the community, is that schools are trying to optimize the number of students in the classroom. They want a full classroom because it is efficient. If the classroom size goes down, well then we're looking at combining classes, we're looking at closing schools.

When we hear community members come and say, The schools are overcrowded, well, we try to understand what they mean by that. And if by that they mean that the classes are full, that's by design. If it means that we are taking flexible space in the school and using it for classroom space, or that we are moving portables onto the site that is taking up recreation space or parking and is not permanent space, well then that means the school is probably overfull and they're trying to account for more classroom space. So there's all these things that are going on at the school level. We don't control that. What we're trying to do is make sure they have adequate funding to build the brick and mortar when they do decide to build it.

Got it. Thank you. And here I thought it was a very simple thing.

My other comment was, as you go through this, especially maybe with counsel, I think it'd be good to try to articulate how much of this code is addressing the requirement that we do scaling of our fees and what else is there in here that is, and maybe the answer is nothing. I don't, I'm not sure that I know, but what else in here is not that, but it's through the process of cleanup we realized that we never had fees on renovations, right? And what whatever it is so that people can get their mind around, okay, we're, the purpose of this started out being to respond to the legislature's requirement that we scale the fees and then we saw we needed to clean up our code and as part of that, here's the list of things that are changing because those are really decisions that are being made in this process that are a little obscured by the way it, you know, when you take old code and create new code and all that. Those things are hard to pick out for let's say the layperson. So I would just suggest as that gets reviewed with the council and the future planning commission that somehow you try to articulate that a little bit.

That's great feedback.

Other comments or questions?

I've got a question. So and this has to do with the account for the impact fees. It's so say a development goes up in the Southeast Corner Of Sammamish and there's no roads improvements put in that area, but it's Englewood Hills improved, nowhere close to that. Is that something that would then have to be refunded because impact fees had been paid and no project impacted or was put in place in the vicinity of the development that was done? Is that part of the bookkeeping that has to occur?

Can you go to the section that talked about service areas? So that'd be the second slide I think, yeah. So, Sammamish historically has and at this point we're not proposing to change this, has one service area. It is the entire city.

So that answers that.

Yeah. So an impact fee that's collected based on this model of service area anywhere in that service area can be applied anywhere in that service area.

Okay. Cool. And that's clear. The reason I was asking is as I was looking at the impact fee accounts, it wasn't referenced to the service area, but those who know this stuff really well might understand and know that.

And what's interesting is there's a whole another consideration about equitable distribution of impact fees collected, right? Having one service area simplifies that. There are other cities that have different service areas where you have to look at how to allocate the impact fee to different service areas. There's equity questions involved in that. It's more challenging. Ours is a fairly simple system. Not arguing either way that, you know, just noting that it's fairly simple compared to some others.

Yeah. Well, it's good to keep it simple. And just playing off of the keep it simple because there's a discussion about the ADUs, it feels to me like they could just be applied based on the square footage. And a lot of them are gonna be small anyway, so it's a relatively small impact fee which doesn't have that big of impact on the affordability. Lots of impacts in there.

And the same thing around remodels for the numbers that would be in place to bookkeep and determine if like I've now put a second story on does that add enough. It just feels like for the amount of money we would collect it's not worth the staff time to do that. It'd be nice to have all the money we could but there's a cost with getting that. My 2¢.

Thank you.

Anything else? Thank you. Interesting.

Yeah. Your last meeting is 08:29.

Not quite done yet. Anything else from you guys?

No. We are next meeting. Just as a FYI, our calendar is a little it's unset at this point, essentially, because we're waiting for the council retreat in early February to kind of understand where they want us to go work plan wise. So when we get direction there, we'll start putting things on the commission calendar. Our next meeting is scheduled for the fifth. And I think we might we have some ideas of good topics we can start moving forward with for that meeting. But just that's an FYI. Otherwise, nothing else from the staff.

Sorry. All I heard was a buzzing in my ear when you said All right. I did just wanna say as I gavel out for the last time, I wanna express my gratitude for the opportunity to work with all of you and for your participation in in in these last years and for the opportunity to serve the citizens in Sammamish. It's been it's been an interesting experience and a lot of good things. I also wanna just leave a word of encouragement for all of you.

Sometimes we get down in the weeds of some of these issues and we forget what how important it is, the work that a planning commission does. And without sounding melodramatic, I would say that I often think to myself that the work that we do is kind of the front line of democracy. It's participation by the people in the community and it has an influence over the community. So don't forget that even though sometimes we're talking about five g and sandwich board signs, the work that you do is really the starting place for the future of our community. So thank you and have fun without me.

Would someone move to adjourn?

So moved.

Second. It's been moved

and seconded that we adjourn. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Thank you. Have a great evening.

Thank you so much.

Thanks, RJ.